Chapter 3 – Flesh and slaughter

Some say that babbling is dangerous in public. And I think this is true. Because you never know what it is you are spilling out to the world in general, as effusively as possible.

But there is a much more dangerous babbling. Babbling inside our minds. Because inside our minds there is no embarrassment, no ‘off’ switch; our minds do go on forever, switched on from birth to death like an attic light hanging dismal, dusty, forgotten amongst all the bric-a-brac crap of a life wasted collecting useless experiences and wasteful emotions.

Still, it’s not that bad. For when I wander the night, pretending to be alone and happy, independent, strong, mysterious, rather than the lonely, sad, slightly depressed, introvert that I am, I can amuse myself with my musings, as I’m doing now.

Water slips over my foot as I stand in a puddle, brain registering the cold wet slipping into my shoe even as my imagination cooks up images of a street-level outdoor urinal where my shoe is the only victim aside from the noses of passers-by. I don’t bother to check – the damage is done. I can already feel the urine soaking through my shoe and into my sock, and the thought manages to dampen my ardour, until it mingles with images of the innocent pair back at the Hotel, and somehow this is erotic. Maybe not ‘peeing with permission,’ but the intimacy of peeing with permission, door open, talking to your loved one.

I pee with the door closed even when I’m all alone in my little room at the top of the stairs. Sometimes I don’t leave my post, watching, and have to pee in a bottle to stop the urine-fidget that shakes my vision as I focus on the screen.

That reminds me, I have to empty the almost-full yellow-Coke bottle beside my leather swivel-chair. It wouldn’t do to have visitors come and see the state I live in.

Visitors! Chance would be a fine thing. My mind prattles on until I realise that I have come full circle, back to the Hotel.

I pause before entering, the not-so-grand, crumbling, graffiti-festooned, urine-stained entrance-way a nod to art deco of days gone by, with only the slightest hint of its tacky origins.

This building, this Hotel – for that is what it always has been, as far back as I can remember, as far back as anyone can remember – was never upmarket or even upbeat. From pictures in what we (I) laughingly call ‘the foyer,’ the Hotel has always been run down, even when this part of town wasn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. This was never a salubrious part of town. This has always been the ‘wrong side of the tracks.’ That’s where I grew up. The wrong side of the tracks.

But this part of the wrong side of the tracks wasn’t always grim and dirty.

Once upon a time it had been an artistic quarter, as the small, dingy galleries that hang on for dear life in the darker recesses of local alleyways attest to. But those heydays of funkily-dressed haute-coutoure rubbing shoulders with the ultra-rich – the only people who could really afford to live the artistic lifestyle, buy the art, and still eat – are long gone, decades past. And all that’s left is the remnant of what once was, and the timelessness of the Hotel, which my rebellious feet have just led me back to.

I trace the dust-coated photos of the city evolving around the Hotel. Evolving, and more recently devolving. What is left outside of the restaurants and bars that would have passed for this area’s “hay day,” are barely recognisable now. Dilapidated tenement buildings, crusted with graffiti, and infested with the sort of “known of” people which elicit either horror, disgust, or pity, and usually all three in equal measure, from any of the “known” denizens of our fair city.

Is the Hotel any different? Are the guests at our hotel better than “known of,” or are we just tainting their aura with some extra patina of ‘acceptability’ simply because they stay within our walls, host their lives within our rooms, and wander up and down our halls? Maybe. But if so, so be it. That is the way of things. For even those outside of the Hotel see our residents as something more than “known of,” of possibly even wishing they had “known” them, during their alternately brief, or more likely, long-term, stays at our dear old Hotel. But once again, I get ahead of myself, and these are simply the ramblings of a lost young-old man, wandering through the empty valleys of his own brain, and spelunking in the cavernous depths of his lost thoughts and unrealised desires.

Desire. I desire to go upstairs and see how my fair couple are getting on. Even if it is in the dark, and they are invisible to me, to stare into a black screen and imagine what they are doing, peeling back the layers of respectability to see them bare and naked as they are to each other, well, that is something that could pass the time pleasantly between now and when I wake up next, possibly tomorrow, possibly in a parallel universe, preferably a better one, yet I would settle for just plain ‘different.’ (I had dreamed it was possible, hoped it would happen even, and it hasn’t. But one can live in hope.)

The stairs creak beneath my feet, giving off the odd gust of stale air from the space between the stairs and the moldy carpet, or at least what’s left of the old raggedy rug that spills down the stairs like a forgotten shawl dropped by the tallest, oldest lady in the world.

My hands track the bannister, skipping the splinter-giving worn bits, and sliding hard along the shiny, million-hand smoothed out wood, tapping the frog-lion carving at each landing as I ascend to my crow’s nest near the roof.

I find myself wavering, wandering down the hall towards their room, then turning back on myself a half-dozen times like a dog chasing its own tail, before finally hurtling up the stairs two at a time and buzzing into my room, nearly knocking over, or indeed sinking into, the rotund food-baby of the second au pair, the one I could never remember the name of.

She smiles distractedly as I dodge past her, seemingly not noticing that her left breast hangs lazily out of her shirt as if she has just finished suckling an infant, and is just now about to tuck it back in. I pause, finger in air, catch her air of indifference, and instead use my raised finger to scratch my eye unnecessarily, to avoid having to explain the finger in the air in the first place. Not that she seems to have noticed this entire interchange. I smile and nod, my eyes stopping to rest on her large brown areola for just long enough to make me both aroused and uncomfortable, before my questing hand finds my doorknob, and I spin into my room, slamming the door behind me.

The au pair’s breast resplendent in gorgeous detail hanging in the air before my eyes, pulls me forward to my chair, past the fridge where I grab my milk, the counter from which I snatch my Oreo cookies, to the chair where I place my bottom and flick on the screen, hoping against hope that something interesting will be on.

My mind takes me down the avenue of flickering through the rooms like some ghost watching human TV, but the pull to this one room, where my two innocents are at play, or even sleeping, is too strong, so I stay, rather than stray, what can I say? It’s just another day to play this way. (It has started again, that damn rhyming crud that fills my mind, to assuage the guilt of behaving in such a grotesque, nosy, base manner. But I cannot help myself. Like a porn addict drawn to search for ever more depravity, sitting up into the late hours to watch un-sexual acts of ever widening variety, just to get that sense of release, or like the body dysmorphic disorder sufferers who cut themselves to relieve the pain of their own existence, so do I sit and watch this black screen, hoping against hope that something will brighten the black, and bring my two innocents back.)

Time ticks on. And staring into darkness has its usual soporific effect, sending me into a doze that never deepens past that, but is enough for me to recoup my sleepless day and ever sleepless-nights. I doze, and in my doze, I dream. And in my dream, I am sucked through the screen, through the darkness, the breathing lack of light. I slip into their bed between them. Not as a third party, but as one or both of them, at the same or different times.
I am with them and of them and inside them. I feel what they feel, and the ache in my chest leaves me for warmer climes. This is good, this feeling of oneness. For the briefest of moments I realise what my life is missing. Not enough to mark it in my mental library as a book to go borrow and read later, but enough to sense it deep in myself, where the child still cries behind closed doors, where no one can see, if anyone could be bothered.

I float down into their deepest fears and desires, and feel nothing wanting.

They fear only losing each other.

They desire only to continue this way, together with each other, in and around each other, forever.

Lips and tongues intertwine lazily with lips and tongues. Hands and fingers trace naked skin, finding and delving, stroking and caressing, and diving right in. Hot, wet, smooth, slick, sweaty, soft, erect, hard, all role into one moving, writhing mass of messy mayhem.

Limbs that are so clumsy in daylight transform into delightful modes of transport; sending nerve endings dancing down others to find those electric jolts of perfect response, and holding them until their is nothing left but to explode with pleasure.

All of this I felt, I knew, I was. With them, in them, of them, until I could take it no more, and found my mind wrapping my own desires around, through, with, and in them. I could see myself taking over, pushing my own hands, fingers, tongue, lips, limbs and thoughts into and out of them, all over their innocent bodies, not two now, but three, her, him, and me.

This is when the demon awakens inside of me. Like a burning ball of flame, my own little hellish sun broiling away inside of my chest, burning my soul to a crisp. ‘This is the real you, the base you, fed on power over others, steeped in blood and pain. Feel this, the real you, taking over.’

I squirm in my sleep, can taste the edge of awakening, the cold air of my little room, Must have left the bathroom window open. Milk and Oreos lay untouched on the small wooden bench by my knee.

I can see all of this even in my dream, so used to evenings by my own personal internal fire. Fireside chat.

And still, no matter how hard I push and pull to tear myself away from this internal inferno, I am trapped. Trapped inside the dream of me. Trapped inside the desire to tear and burn, kill and maim, that echoes some baser animal deep inside. Echoes of urges to do the wrong thing at the wrong time, but not even to get away with it; the punishment to follow simply part of the play, a necessary piece of the puzzle in working out who I really am.

There is blood. Lots of it. Pouring from open wounds, pooling in my palms, slipping through my fingers, dripping from my fingertips, darkening the already threadbare carpet beneath my feet. I am in the room with them. This is their blood. She stands by the bed, hands on her face, toxic shock beginning to run through her body, resplendent in all its nudity. Innocent even as she takes in the picture on the bed.

Her lover is still tied up as she had left him a moment ago. Handcuffs and rope holding him in place. But these are not what her horrified eyes are focused on. No. She is not concerned in the least with her own handiwork. It is my handiwork that she is so stuck by. The over-sized butcher’s knife hanging from my hand, her lover’s entrails spilling out of the torn cavity in his chest, pooling all around him, slipping snake-like from the edge of the bed to tease the floor with their sputum.

All of this she takes in with shock, with horror, and another glint in her eye? Is it rage? Fear? Desire? Animal lust? Is that deep dark inferno burning in her soul too? Is she not the innocent I had originally taken her for? All questions that spin through my mind as I feel the butcher’s knife heavy in my hand, calling out to be used, to cleave, to slice, to separate flesh from flesh.

I take a step towards her, raising my arm as if to wave, before plunging the point of the blade facing upwards in her navel, and tearing upwards, holding her close as the blood pours out over my hand, wrist, arm, soaking my jeans.

She sighs and jerks, too surprised to move or fight, almost grasping me in a final loving embrace as she dies, as if to say, ‘Ah yes, finally, it’s you. I have been waiting for you all along.’